Frankfurt Intersection
Doing away with the pork
sausage image: a diverse scene of artists, galleries, and institutions has
developed in Frankfurt am Main. One individual particularly responsible
for this fact is Thomas Bayrle, the professor at the Städel School who set
the creative boom into motion. The banks have also contributed
considerably towards the city’s international reputation as a creative hub
that boasts artists the likes of Tobias Rehberger, Ayse Erkmen, and Jeppe
Hein. On the occasion of
Art Frankfurt, Silke Hohmann offers a summary of the exhibition and
art activities currently taking place on the River Main.
When it’s a matter of art “made in
Frankfurt/Main,”
Thomas Bayrle has been at the very center for over 35 years. The artist
was celebrated accordingly upon retiring as professor at the
Hochschule für bildende Künste (Städelschule). On the
occasion of Bayrle’s 65th birthday, Frankfurt’s
Städel Museum is currently dedicating a big
one-person exhibition to the Berlin-born artist, who addressed the
phenomenon of mass production more or less simultaneously with
Andy Warhol in his serial graphic works from the nineteen-sixties. For
many, it’s unclear whether Bayrle’s departure heralds the end of an era,
but one thing remains certain: he played a major role in Frankfurt’s
transformation into one of Germany’s leading art metropolises. And he was
responsible for introducing Pop Art to the German centers of banking and
finance.
Along with well-known objects such as the Tassen-Tasse
(“Cups Cup”) from 1969, a precocious work in which Bayrle formally and
thematically investigated consumerism and the dominance of materialism,
the Städel is also presenting new works in which the artist harks back to
a former motif of his: the highway. Back in the seventies, Bayrle built
cardboard models of three-lane highways bundled up into tangled patterns
or hieroglyphs
; well before the onset of a collective ecological awareness, his prayer
wheel-like, repetitive litanies on jobs, ecological questions, highway
construction, insurance, and general uneasiness pointed to the chronic
headache of the “system.” Last year, he developed a gigantic wall piece on
this complex of themes that went by the title Maschendrahtzaun
(“Chain Link Fence”), which could be seen in a similar form at the
50th Venice Biennale – in close proximity to
Tobias Rehberger, probably his most successful pupil.
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Indeed, Bayrle is a kind of
“Frankfurt Intersection” in the busy traffic of the German art
scene, where a number of important lanes come together and separate again.
While his own visual language is unmistakable, the formal approaches of
his students are noticeably many-faceted: from painting and
design-oriented installations to documentary and scientific experiments,
Bayrle’s students cover a wide variety of genres. Thomas Bayrle seems to
have been less concerned with teaching a way of making art than with
thinking itself: conceptual, yet without being dogged; open to every
discipline while remaining precise in the work’s execution.
In the meantime, a new Städel generation has emerged, including the Bayrle
students
Tue Greenfort,
Jeppe Hein, and Simon D. Møller. When Frankfurt’s long-time local big fish
Kasper König took over the direction of the
Museum Ludwig in Cologne and the Dane
Daniel Birnbaum followed in his tracks as director of the Städel and the
associated Portikus, a
small but noticeable group of young Scandinavian artists came to
Frankfurt, making it, as in the case of Hein, into the larger exhibition
venues such as the Shirn
and from there to the Biennale in Venice – with an art that humorously
analyzes everyday phenomena while remaining strictly conceptual on a
formal level. For his ant terrarium, for instance, Tue Greenfort received
the annual “Rundgang” prize funded by local sponsors. In his various
projects, the Danish artist had already sought dialogue with animals,
which he offered decent living conditions in return for taking part in his
art works. In Frankfurt’s eastern industrial districts, home of the Städel
School artists’ studios, Greenfort discovered a thriving fox population
and set up a camera at night, baiting the shutter release. What ensued was
a regular symbiotic
exchange between sausage and photograph, producing a series of images whose
associative potential ranged from enlightening documentation to poetic
metaphor. Greenfort’s award and the ensuing attention paid to him were not
only thanks to his artistic qualities, but also his teacher Thomas
Bayrle’s readiness to provide Rundgang visitors with information on his
students’ goals and concerns.
An interest in very young art,
however, is a tradition of Frankfurt’s exhibition halls: the year-long
director of the Museum
für Moderne Kunst (MMK),
Jean-Christophe Amman, regularly visited the studios of Städel students
and then placed their works in direct relation to artists long since part
of the museum canon. The Portikus, as well, the exhibition space connected
to the Städel that Kaspar König led to international fame on the
contemporary art scene, exhibited both big names (and, in noticeable
number, those that later became big) and, again and again, artists from
its own Städel ranks; among them was Tobias Rehberger, who was shown in
the mid-nineties. In the meantime, Rehberger is himself professor at the
Städel and leads a sculpture class.
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